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I don't necessarily think that billing which is hard to estimate is good for anyone. For large deals I've seen this be a real turn off. Same with surprise bills. Ultimately if the service can scale billing in a way that their value scales to the customer (Datadog and Snowflake come close to this) then both the provider and the customer will be happy.

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Side story, and that might not be true as of today, but Datadog was a nightmare billing-wise for me. Probably precisely because they didn't use a tool like the one launched in this post. Anything ranging from seeing your live usage to getting a rough idea of what your bill at the end of the month would be was impossible, not to mention the absence of any kind of alert even after reaching $30x our previous month usage. Usage based is fantastic when done properly, but can quickly turn to a nightmare for the user on half-assed systems.

I heard they only fully automated it post IPO, and have a full team of senior engineers + PM on this topic now!

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